The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
A Song of Middle-Earth, by Way of Russia: "The Orcs Marched out of Mordor"
Here's the latest from Zoya, a singer with the prominent Russian band Leningrad (Russian lyrics here). It has over 350K page views, though it was just posted today (or yesterday Russian time)—I try to focus the posts in this thread on relatively prominent works, since my goal is in part to offer a sense of how some people over there are perceiving things.
The meaning is not completely clear on the face of the song, and as best I can tell, the band members aren't themselves particularly pro-Ukrainian—they are more cynical and realist than ideological, it seems to me (see this song, which I blogged a month ago). But "orc" appears to be a common reference to Russian soldiers by Ukrainians and other critics of Russia, though some say it also has other deeper meanings.
The orcs marched out of Mordor
In the last dawn
They were singing songs together
The fighting orcs.About fate and about the foreign land
And about their mothers at home
And about the orc's cudgel
With which to kill the elves.Let the whole world be in ruins—and fuck everything else
Let the whole world be, yes, in ruins—and fuck everything else.
